


between the pages

by bookhobbit



Series: The Magic Circle [4]
Category: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell - Susanna Clarke
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-26
Updated: 2015-10-26
Packaged: 2018-04-28 05:19:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,029
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5079376
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bookhobbit/pseuds/bookhobbit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Miss Wintertowne attempts to pitch woo, and entirely fails to notice how successful she is.</p>
            </blockquote>





	between the pages

**Author's Note:**

> today on things I forgot to upload: I've been working on this since FREAKIN JULY and posted it like four days ago and promptly forgot to put it here. Whatever. Anyway this is based on Moll's idea.

March 1818  

A scream tore through Starecross.

Arabella was instantly awake and half out of bed before she realized it. Her first thought was that it had been one of the students, but it had been too close; she stopped and thought. Emma was the only woman close enough to - Oh. Emma.

Arabella pulled on her housecoat and rushed to Emma’s door. When she knocked Emma opened the door looking shadow-eyed and afraid.

“Emma?” said Arabella.

“I am…” Emma trailed off.

“Are you having a nightmare?” Arabella put on the calm briskness she used for her students, for it might prove reassuring.

“Yes.”

“Would you like me to stay with you?”

Emma nodded miserably and stepped backwards. “It helps, you see,” she said, sighing. “To have someone here.”

“Of course,” said Arabella softly. “I understand.” She stepped into Emma’s room. “Where would you like me?”

“Would you sit in the bed with me?”

“Yes, naturally.” They climbed in, Emma sliding under the covers and Arabella staying on top of them, and then Arabella brought Emma’s head to her chest so that she could stroke her hair. The familiar feeling of soft hair under her fingertips soothed her, too.

It must have been correct, because Emma allowed it.

“Segundus stayed with me once,” said Emma, snuggling a little closer.

“Did he? But he is a gentleman.”

“Oh, but he was my doctor for some time,” said Emma carelessly. “It can hardly have been improper."1

"No, I suppose not. In Venice Miss Graysteel stayed with me. She was very kind. You would like her, I believe.”

“Perhaps I would, from what you have told me.”

There was a quietness for a while, in which Emma breathed slowly but did not sleep.

“What was the nightmare about?” Arabella asked finally. “Lost-hope?”

“Yes,” said Emma. “They always are. There were children being thrown off towers. I daresay you dream the same dream, at times. Stephen does. The King does, I mean.”

“I did a great deal when I was in Italy,” said Arabella, leaning further against the headboard as her eyes grew tired. “Not so much any more. But occasionally it returns to me.”

“The urge to dance.”

“And to walk.”

“I must have walked more miles and danced more dances in ten years than most people do in their whole lives,” said Emma, as Arabella’s fingers ran through her hair. “It seems a pity that it did not make my legs any stronger.”

“Mmm.”

Under Arabella’s skilled treatment, Emma was soon calm again.

“Stay with me, please,” she murmured. “Sleep here. We are old friends, after all. There can be no question of impropriety.”

Arabella sighed. “I suppose not,” she said softly. “It would be nice to have company. I miss it, you know. Since Jonathan. It feels very lonely to be by yourself in a bed after you have grown used to having someone with you.”

Emma wordlessly held the covers open, and Arabella slid down under them.

It was Emma who fell asleep first, and so Arabella supposed her strategy must have been effective after all.

Arabella’s last few thoughts before drifting off were the sort of absurd things that do come when one is half-asleep. They concerned how much she liked being here with Emma, how she would not trade it for the world, how she would sleep here every night if she could.

Silly thoughts, of course, came when one was nearly insensible with sleep.

Silly thoughts, but not always untrue ones.

-

Emma woke to warmth in her arms and tangled blankets. It took a moment for the recollection of last night to assert themselves. When they did, she opened her eyes and found Arabella in front of her.

She looked very peaceful, breathing gently, face slack. Emma reached out and brushed a stray tendril of hair from her face.

It was moments like these that were always the hardest. She had loved Arabella so long that it seemed so natural to reach out and touch her, to hold her. Yet when such things were within her grasp, she was keenly reminded of the fact that Arabella was not hers to keep, and never could be. She was, after all, a married woman.

Although a married woman whose husband was gone, now that Emma thought about it.

No, that would be immoral. Unless Arabella wanted it.

Arabella stirred, and Emma hastily snatched her hand back.

“Good morning,” said Arabella with a yawn. She sat up and stretched. “I hope you are as well-rested as can be expected.”

“Oh! Yes,” said Emma. “Thanks to you. I really do appreciate it, Bell.”

Arabella smiled. “Of course, my love.”

“And you? Did you sleep well?”

“Yes. I find that I do sleep better with another person. It is curious. I suppose that is what comes of having been married. Assuming one slept with one’s husband, of course,” she added, glancing at Emma.

“I suppose it must be difficult. It must be like being a widow,” said Emma gently.

“When I last saw Jonathan he told me not to be one,” said Arabella. Her smile had an edge of pain. But she added, “Perhaps I ought to find a new person for the position, if he will not be here to claim it.”

Emma only just managed to control her reflex, which was to open her mouth in an O. “I would not have thought you would have done such a thing.”

“My dear Emma. Surely you are not judging me. You live to flout convention.”

“Of course I do, but you do not. I approve of your choice. It is merely that I am very surprized by it.”

“Perhaps,” said Arabella softly, “Perhaps there are other things about me you do not know.”

“I am sure that is true,” said Emma, flabbergasted. “And I hope to find some of them out.”

“I hope you will too,” said Arabella, quietly.

They separated then to prepare for the day, but Emma thought about her words all morning.

She began her campaign two weeks later, after much thought. Her first notion had been to simply confess her feelings to Arabella. She had a vague subconscious notion of nightdresses and thunderstorms and running through woods to find one’s own true love and tell them your feelings. Everything in Faerie had been very theatrical, and she had spent a very long time there; added to an innately dramatic temperament, her notion of a confession of love was naturally a tempestuous thing.  However, she had rejected this as possibly alarming Arabella, perhaps scaring her away. The current scheme was much more subtle.

She gathered Sappho and Katherine Philips and Mary Wollstonecraft, women whose words meant something important to her, women whose words could say what hers could not.

She marked passages carefully, leaving bookmarks as if by chance. And then she stacked them neatly by her bedside table, waiting for opportunities.

-

Arabella thought at first that it was a mere matter of absentmindedness. Emma is, after all, an untidy person. Leaving books around Arabella’s schoolroom did not seem like much of a stretch from stacking them in piles around her desk.

So when A Vindication of the Rights of Woman appeared on her desk at work with no context, she merely assumed it was a fluke, and tucked it into her bag to give back to Emma.

The next few incidents were more suspicious. Emma took the Vindication back, rather stiffly Arabella thought, and after that Arabella found several books scattered around the drawing-room in which she often worked. One had a bookmark on Katherine Philips’ To my Excellent Lucasia, on our Friendship.

She returned each of these, to an increasingly wooden look from Emma.

But when she found Sappho in the bedroom, she knew for certain what Emma was about.

“My love,” she said aloud to the empty room, “You have no subtlety. Not when it comes to matters of the heart.”

She was much like Jonathan in that respect, Arabella thought, although Emma would hate to be told that.

Sighing, she picked up Sappho and sat down. After some thought, she took up a pencil from her bedside table.

Now, what to write…

-

“It has been five weeks,” said Emma, tearing at her napkin. She was having tea with Segundus and the Nameless King, as she often did these days since he had started to visit. In theory, they ought to have been talking about how to improve human-fairy relations, which was the express purpose of these meetings, but she had got distracted. “Five weeks! Have I been too covert?”

Segundus and the King exchanged glances. “I don’t believe you have,” said the King carefully.

“Why has she not noticed?”

“Perhaps she has,” said Segundus gently, “And she is waiting for the right moment.”

Emma frowned. “Perhaps she has and does not want to cause offense by telling me no.”

Segundus’s manner indicated that he had not wanted to voice this possibility, but that it was possible.

“Perhaps you ought to speak directly to her,” said the King. “I find that generally in affairs of the heart, direct communication is the best route. Delicacy is all very well and good, but the wisest way to solve things is to talk about them. Any time I have to resolve a conflict between people, I find that simply discussing what lead to it often goes some way towards repairing any hurt.”

Emma noticed Segundus was looking a little odd at this, but put it aside for the moment. “Perhaps you are right,” she said, sighing. “You generally are.”

The King smiled at this. “I do spend a great deal of my time now resolving conflict between members of an extremely changable and mercurial race,” he said.

“And before that you managed many servants and kept them all in line and in relative harmony, which I think must have been nearly as hard considering how different they all must have been.” Emma put down her teacup, and stood up. “I do hope you will excuse me. I have to finish finding the readings for the next fortnight’s classes.”

Segundus and the King said of course they would and that they hoped she should find her work going speedily.

Emma went back to her rooms and found the books she was chusing readings from. Among them was Wolestonecraft’s essay, which she had left for Arabella and which had been returned with a smile. She frowned at it, for it only reminded her of the futility of her cause; but as she could not put off her work, she picked it up. There was a bookmark where she had made note of some points to discuss, which Arabella had not disturbed. Emma opened the book to the bookmark and was halfway through the paragraph when she realized there was a note scribbled on the margin in light, easily-erasable pencil.

It said, “You are quite the most extraordinary woman I have ever met.”

Emma stared at it. It was Arabella’s handwriting. Unquestionably it was Arabella’s handwriting. For a moment she could do nothing, and then she dropped the book and scrambled to gather the others she had left for Arabella to find. She flipped through the pages of each and found notes, one per book, marked by small pieces of paper barely visible from the outside. One said, “You have the most beautiful eyes I think I have ever seen”; another said, “I am not lonely when I am with you”; another said “I will be forever grateful for the time we have together”; and last, in Sappho, was a larger piece of paper tucked into the middle of the book with a note on it. The note said, “I have been considering very closely, and I think we might be quite happy together. If your books mean what I think they mean, be silent no longer, but speak. I shall answer.”

Emma sat down on the floor with a thump, eyes not leaving the paper. She read it twice more, and looked back at all the others.

Then she smiled, stood up, straightened her gown.

And went to speak.

 

**Author's Note:**

> 1Arabella’s objection mirrored Mr Segundus’s at the time. He considered Emma to be in his care, however, and therefore not wishing to refuse her any comfort, he conceded. He resolved to sit up with her only, and remained in a chair pulled beside her bed while she leaned on him and he soothed her.
> 
> However, it had been a rather long and exhausting night already, and so the end result was that Mr Segundus fell asleep next to her. Now, Emma slept with her hair down as a rule, and in consequence when he woke up he found himself surrounded by a cloud of hair and thoroughly confused. The confusion was soon superseded by alarm as he realized he had fallen asleep beside a married lady. However, Emma herself expressed a great deal of impatience with this view. “My dear sir,” she said, “You have seen me in restraints and with roses at my mouth. Indeed, it was you who restored my finger. Why on Earth should a little sleeping - in clearly extenuating circumstances - be so much worse?”


End file.
